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Blank Spots on the Map

Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World is an exposé of an empire that continues to grow every year — and which, officially, it isn’t even there. It is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer’s road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and C.I.A. “black ops” sites, a shadow nation of state secrets: clandestine military bases, ultra-secret black sites, classified factories, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies making up what defense and intelligence insiders themselves call the “black world.” Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist and a provocateur. His impassioned, rigorous and relentless research into areas that officially don’t exist leads him on a globe-trotting investigation into a vast, undemocratic and uncontrolled hidden empire. Traveling to the Middle East, Central America, and even around our nation’s capital and its suburbs, he interviews the people who live on the edges of these blank spots. National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Rebecca Solnit says, “Some of the worst crimes in the American landscape are hiding in plain sight, and nobody has ever pursued them more thoroughly or explained them more chillingly and engagingly than Trevor Paglen. What he is doing is important, fascinating, and groundbreaking.”(Dutton Books/Penguin Group)